Sparks Fly: Building A 330 KV Supply From A PC PSU

August 7, 2025 by Matt Varian 30 Comments

If you’re hunting for a bench power supply, you’ll quickly notice options dry up above 48 V or so, and you definitely won’t find a 330 kV supply on the shelf at your local electronics shop. But with just a few parts, [Mircemk] has crafted a high-voltage source from a modified PC power supply that delivers electrifying results.

The sparks arcing over a foot of thin air are a dead giveaway, but let’s be clear: this project is not for beginners. High voltage — defined as around 1,000 V and up, with this project hitting 350 times that — carries risks of severe injury or death. Only tackle it if you fully understand the dangers and take precautions like proper insulation and never working alone.

This project showcases a Cockcroft-Walton voltage multiplier, a clever setup using diodes and capacitors to step up voltage. The capacitors charge and discharge in an alternating pattern, doubling the voltage after each diode pair. [Mircemk] uses 3 mm thick Plexiglas as an insulator, providing both structure and electrical isolation for the diode-capacitor cascade.

To achieve the 330,000 V output, [Mircemk] starts by modifying a standard PC ATX power supply, removing the Schottky diodes from the secondary winding’s output to produce a roughly 15 V square wave. This feeds into another transformer, boosting the voltage before it enters the Cockcroft-Walton multiplier. At first glance, the multiplier’s sides look identical, but their opposite polarities create a massive potential difference across the spark gap.

[Mircemk]’s benchtop exploration into high-voltage territory is a shocking success. If this project lights up your curiosity, dive into our other high-voltage adventures, like DIY Tesla coils or plasma speakers, for more electrifying inspiration.

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An Adjustable High-Voltage Power Supply Built With Safety In Mind

January 6, 2024 by Dan Maloney 11 Comments

It’s not entirely clear why [Advanced Tinkering] needs a 50,000-volt power supply, but given the amount of work he put into this one, we’re going to guess it will be something interesting.

The stated specs for this power supply are pretty simple: a power supply that can be adjusted between 20kV and 50kV. The unstated spec is just as important: don’t kill yourself or anyone else in the process. To that end, [Advanced] put much effort into making things as safe as possible. The basic architecture of the supply is pretty straightforward, with a ZVS driver and an AC flyback transformer. Powered by a 24-volt DC supply and an adjustable DC-DC converter, that setup alone yields something around 20kV — not too shabby, but still far short of the spec. The final push to the final voltage is thanks to a three-stage Cockcroft-Walton multiplier made with satisfyingly chunky capacitors and diodes. To ensure everything stays safe in the high-voltage stage, he took the precaution of potting everything in epoxy. Good thing, too; tests before potting showed arcing in the CW multiplier despite large isolation slots in the PCB.

Aside from the potting, some really interesting details went into this build, especially on the high-voltage side. The 3D-printed and epoxy-filled HV connector is pretty cool, as is the special wire needed to keep arcs at bay. The whole build is nicely detailed, too, with care taken to bond each panel of the rack-mount case to a common ground point.

It’s a nice build, and we can’t wait to see what [Advanced Tinkering] does with it. In the meantime, if you want to get up to speed on handling high voltage safely, check out our HV primer.

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DIY Ionizer Clears The Air On A Budget

January 12, 2020 by Dan Maloney 65 Comments

Have you ever had a good, deep breath of the air near a waterfall, or perhaps after a thunderstorm? That unmistakably fresh smell is due to ionized air, specifically negative ions, and many are the claims concerning their health benefits. A minor industry has sprung up to capitalize on the interest in ionized air, and while [Amaldev] wanted to clean up the Mumbai air coming into his home, he didn’t want to pay a lot for a commercial unit. So he built his own air ionizer for only about $10.

When [Amaldev] dropped this in the Hackaday tip line, he indicated that he’d been taking some heat for the design from Instagram followers. We imagine a fair number of the complaints stem from the cluster of sewing needles that bristle from one end of the PCB and are raised to 6,000 volts by a fifteen-stage Cockcroft-Walton multiplier. That’s sure to raise eyebrows, or possible the hair on one’s head if you happen to brush by the emitters. Or perhaps [Amaldev]’s critics are dubious about the benefits of ionized air; indeed, some commenters on the video below seem to think that the smoke in the closed jar was not precipitated by the ion stream as [Amaldev] claims, but rather somehow was settled by heat or some other trickery.

Neither of those bothers us as much as the direct 230-volt mains connection, though. We’d have preferred to see at least an isolation transformer in there, or perhaps a battery-powered flyback circuit to supply the input to that multiplier. Still, the lesson on cascade multipliers was welcome, and we found the smoke-clearing power of ionized air pretty amazing.

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Expanding Horizons With The Ion Propelled Lifter

July 13, 2016 by Steven Dufresne 39 Comments

Like many people, going through university followed an intense career building period was a dry spell in terms of making things. Of course things settled down and I finally broke that dry spell to work on what I called “non-conventional propulsion”.

I wanted to stay away from the term “anti-gravity” because I was enough of a science nut to know that such a thing was dubious. But I also suspected that there might be science principles yet to be discovered. I was willing to give it a try anyway, and did for a few years. It was also my introduction to the world of high voltage… DC. Everything came out null though, meaning that any effects could be accounted for by some form of ionization or Coulomb force. At no time did I get anything to actually fly, though there was a lot of spinning things on rotors or weight changes on scales and balances due to ion propulsion.

So when a video appeared in 2001 from a small company called Transdimensional Technologies of a triangle shaped, aluminum foil and wire thing called a lifter that actually propelled itself off the table, I immediately had to make one. I’d had enough background by then to be confident that it was flying using ion propulsion. And in fact, given my background I was able to put an enhancement in my first version that others came up with only later.

Lifter parts

Lifter flying

For those who’ve never seen a lifter, it’s extremely simple. Think of it as a very leaky capacitor. One electrode is an aluminum foil skirt, in the shape of a triangle. Spaced apart from that around an inch or so away, usually using 1/6″ balsa wood sticks, is a very thin bare wire (think 30AWG) also shaped as a triangle. High voltage is applied between the foil skirt and the wire. The result is that a downward jet of air is created around and through the middle of the triangle and the lifter flies up off the table. But that is just the barest explanation of how it works. We must go deeper!

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Wrangling High Voltage

June 15, 2016 by Steven Dufresne 28 Comments

Working with high voltage is like working with high pressure plumbing. You can spring a leak in your plumbing, and of course you fix it. And now that you’ve fixed that leak, you’re able to increase the pressure still more, and sometimes another leak occurs. I’ve had these same experiences but with high voltage wiring. At a high enough voltage, around 30kV or higher, the leak manifests itself as a hissing sound and a corona that appears as a bluish glow of excited ions spraying from the leak. Try to dial up the voltage and the hiss turns into a shriek.

Why do leaks occur in high voltage? I’ve found that the best way to visualize the reason is by visualizing electric fields. Electric fields exist between positive and negative charges and can be pictured as electric field lines (illustrated below on the left.) The denser the electric field lines, the stronger the electric field.

Weak and strong electric fields

Ionization in electric fields

The stronger electric fields are where ionization of the air occurs. As illustrated in the “collision” example on the right above, ionization can happen by a negatively charged electron leaving the electrically conductive surface, which can be a wire or a part of the device, and colliding with a nearby neutral atom turning it into an ion. The collision can result in the electron attaching to the atom, turning the atom into a negatively charged ion, or the collision can knock another electron from the atom, turning the atom into a positively charged ion. In the “stripping off” example illustrated above, the strong electric field can affect things more directly by stripping an electron from the neutral atom, again turning it into a positive ion. And there are other effects as well such as electron avalanches and the photoelectric effect.

In either case, we wanted to keep those electrons in the electrically conductive wires or other surfaces and their loss constitutes a leak in a very real way.

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High Voltage Please, But Don’t Forget The Current

June 8, 2016 by Steven Dufresne 30 Comments

In high voltage applications involving tens of thousands of volts, too often people think about the high voltage needed but don’t consider the current. This is especially so when part of the circuit that the charge travels through is an air gap, and the charge is in the form of ions. That’s a far cry from electrons flowing in copper wire or moving through resistors.

Consider the lifter. The lifter is a fun, lightweight flying machine. It consists of a thin wire and an aluminum foil skirt separated by an air gap. Apply 25kV volts across that air gap and it lifts into the air.

Lifter flying with high voltage power supply

Lifter parts

So you’d think that the small handheld Van de Graaff generator pictured below, that’s capable of 80kV, could power the lifter. However, like many high voltage applications, the lifter works by ionizing air, in this case ionizing air surrounding the thin wire resulting in a bluish corona. That sets off a chain of events that produces a downward flowing jet of air, commonly called ion wind, lifting the lifter upward.

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Arc from a flyback transformer power supply

A Cornucopia Of High Voltage Sources

May 26, 2016 by Steven Dufresne 39 Comments

Having hacked away with high voltage for many years I’ve ended up using a large number of very different high voltage sources. I say sources and not power supplies because I’ve even powered a corona motor by rubbing a PVC pipe with a cotton cloth, making use of the triboelectric effect. But while the voltage from that is high, the current is too low for producing the necessary ion wind to make a lifter fly up off a tabletop. For that I use a flyback transformer and Cockcroft-Walton voltage multiplier power supply that’s plugged into a wall socket.

So yes, I have an unorthodox skillset when it comes to sourcing high voltage. It’s time I sat down and listed most of the power sources I’ve used over the years, including a bit about how they work, what their output is like and what they can be used for, as well as some idea of cost or ease of making. The order is from least powerful to most powerful so keep reading for the ones that really bite.

Triboelectric Effect

You’ve no doubt encountered this effect. It’s how your body is charged when you rub your feet on carpet and then get a shock from touching a door knob. When you rub two specific materials together there’s a transfer of electrons from one to the other. Not just any two materials will work. To find out which materials are good to use, have a look at a triboelectric series table.

Materials that are on the positive end of the table will become positively charged when rubbed against materials on the negative end of the table. Those materials will become negatively charged. The further apart they are in the table, the stronger the charging.

Powering corona motor with triboelectricity

An example of where I’ve used this is to power the corona motor shown here. I vigorously rub a PVC pipe with a cotton cloth, and as the pipe emerges from the cloth, a sharp wire a few millimeters away takes the charge from the pipe. You can see this corona motor being powered by other power sources in the video here.

This would be considered an electrostatic power source because charge is accumulated on surfaces. Being insulating materials, that charge can’t move around.

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